I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was looking forward to reading Bleddyn Bowen’s Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space, which came out in the U.S. on January 1. Not only have I finished this excellent book, but I also happened to attend the excellent Space Science in Context (SSiC) conference just afterwards, which included a relevant session on “Space, Technology and Dual-Use”. This pleasant coincidence has me thinking about military use of space technology this week (and also about the lack of my beloved Oxford comma in these titles, but that’s not the topic of today’s newsletter).
Bowen, an expert in international relations in space, argues in his book that it is “ahistorical and incorrect… to accuse certain states of ‘militarising’ space today. Space was already militarised.” This is what he calls the “original sin” of space technology: the influence of military interests right from the start of human activity in space. He does an excellent job of walking through the history of space technology and its military applications: not just the well-known parts of the story like the U.S.’s recruitment of Wernher von Braun or the later development of ICBMs, but all of the other useful technologies deployed over the decades, from telecommunications to surveillance satellites. For people concerned about the violent uses of space, today’s space technology isn’t merely fruit of the poison tree; the original sin is still present and ongoing.
I especially liked Bowen’s point that unethical or violent uses of technology are the result of deliberate human choices, “not some blameless, non-human one-directional trend of ‘technological progress’.” This struck a particular chord with me because there’s a certain narrative in space colonization advocacy that argues that space colonization itself is an inevitable result of human nature and technological progress. The lack of personal agency in this argument has always frustrated me.
Bowen also pushes back against utopian visions of space, which could include both space scientists who wish their field could remain as clean and bloodless and noble as they always imagined it to be, and techno-utopians who believe that expanding human society into space will somehow effortlessly produce a better, thriving society. “Space technology is portrayed as a road to absolution when it has entrenched inequalities on Earth and made the most powerful militaries more efficient at killing people and breaking things,” Bowen writes. “This disconnect is as uncomfortable as it is ubiquitous.”
This reminded me of the work of Zahra Khan, a former aerospace engineer who’s been speaking out for the last several years about the ubiquitous overlap between space science and the military-industrial complex. Khan wrote a white paper (which I co-authored) for the 2020 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey suggesting that the ethical concerns experienced by people working in space science may have an disproportionately chilling effect on people of color, who are members of communities that experience violence as a result of military space technology. She spoke on this topic at the SSiC panel I mentioned, quoting a survey respondent from the white paper who noted that “I really don't like having to weigh my astronomical adjacency to the US military industrial complex against my background and the safety of people who look like me.”
This is a difficult problem for individual space researchers or workers to address, because space science institutions and space technology companies receive so much funding from the Department of Defense, and these industries are so entangled with the military— which is unsurprising, giving Bowen’s argument about space technology’s original sin. But as Bowen also points out, this entanglement is the result of choices people make. We can’t just shrug and write it off to fate.
In her SSiC talk, Khan pointed to other industries and companies where workers have organized and protested against the unethical use of the products of their labor, like the Wayfair walkout against selling furniture to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Agency for use in immigrant detention centers, or even the origins of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who were responding to Bowen’s “original sin.” Khan asks: “How do we move towards ethically exploring space if currently, the ‘cost of doing business’ is to support the [military-industrial complex] in all its destructiveness?”
In Other News
I was delighted to see that there are a couple of reviews out already for my upcoming book, Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space.
Publisher’s Weekly says:
Nesvold’s timely warning is bolstered by nuanced ethics and her careful attention to how colonization has historically been accompanied by injustice and violence. This raises hard questions that deserve serious consideration.
And Library Journal says:
This well-researched and accessible book is for general readers or those interested in the philosophy of science or the ethics of space travel.